A Discursive Construction of China’s National Image in The Economist’s China Column: From the Perspective of Attitudinal Resources

Taking the attitudinal system in Martin’s Appraisal Theory as the analytical framework, this study takes news reports in The Economist’s dedicated China column from 2020 to 2025 as the research corpus. Adopting an integrated method of corpus-based quantitative annotation and critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the distribution patterns of attitudinal resources, discursive strategies, and the mechanism through which China’s national image is constructed. The findings show that the column is characterized by dominance of negative judgment resources and an overall scarcity of positive attitudes. Political issues are persistently labeled as “authoritarian” and “opaque”; economic coverage presents a contradictory discourse of “opportunity versus risk”; social and cultural issues rely heavily on negative emotional rendering; and diplomatic topics continuously reinforce the “China threat” narrative. Through selective deployment and value-laden bias of attitudinal resources, The Economist constructs an image of China as “powerful but suspicious, rising yet threatening”. Such representation essentially reflects Eurocentric ideology and Western discursive hegemony in international news discourse. This study reveals the micro-linguistic mechanism of national image construction in Western mainstream media and provides theoretical and practical implications for enhancing China’s international communication capacity and optimizing its national image.